


A Stately Groom

by Lilliburlero



Category: English and Scottish Popular Ballads - Francis James Child, Redgauntlet - Sir Walter Scott, Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Handwaving, Legal issues, Post-Canon, Scots Language, Scots Leid, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 17:46:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2660906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Roxbrugh he was my grandfather...'   Janet discovers which Roxbrughe, and legal issues arise which have the potential to put Jarndyce v Jarndyce in the halfpenny place.</p><p>*</p><p>to havisham's <a href="http://lilliburlero.dreamwidth.org/60632.html?thread=85976#cmt85976">prompt</a>.</p><p>Advisory: one reference to the canonical abortifacient herb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Stately Groom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



This volume of litigation, Janet reflected, scarcely made for a serene first year of married life, or a calm pregnancy. She felt heavy and tired. Her feet were too fat for her shoes. Dressing that morning, she’d knocked a precious vial of scent to the floor, where it burst into smithereens, and shrieked like an Aberdeen herring-wife at her maid, whose hands were full of combs and ribbons, for failing to catch it.

Precedent, she gathered, was the important thing. And there was no precedent for this. 

She remembered the first morning she had woken up beside Tam in their own bed; his cock was hard in the small of her back and she’d said, sleepily,

‘‘T’willna harm the bairn, gin you tak’ care.’

‘Naw, hinny, ‘s jist a piss-stand.’

He’d hopped out of the bed, though, and used the po, and before his skin had quite warmed up from the brief excursion his cock was hard in the small of her back again. He fucked her then all cosy-like, reaching round to tickle until she squealed and bucked and sank back on him, and he spent then, growling and hissing. By the time his hot hard gad had softened and slipped out of her she was dozing. When she came to again he was talking, and seemed to have been for some time. It was a homely sortae chaunter, about his granda and how they used to go hawking. _Hawking_? Maybe the granda was an old-fashioned sort who thought fowling-pieces weren’t sporting. Or maybe she really was with child to a pedlar’s brat, she thought, a bubble of naughty mirth gathering in her throat. He started to tell an involved tale about his grandfather and some poachers. About halfway through she wriggled round suspiciously to face him. He smiled down at her and stroked her hair.

‘Ah’m blitherin—’

‘Duke,’ she said firmly. ‘Roxburghe is a dukedom. And you’ve been saying _Earl_. Whae was he, Tam? You’re the faither o ma child gin he was a duke or a pedlar, but I haftae ken—’

Tam’s face hardened and his eyes blazed, as they had done when he found her picking the grey herb. ‘Sir Rabbie Ker. Created so by the grace of his late Majesty—’

‘Which late Majesty?’

‘Jamy—James Saxt.’

He wasn’t joking, because when she started to laugh weakly, he looked feart.

‘Janet—I was within yon hill—a while—was I no?’

‘Aye. A lang, lang while. Ower a hundred year. It’s November the second, seventeen hundred and ninety, new style—ekshally, dinna fash aboot that, it’s no important, considerin.’

‘No—no seven year, naw?’

‘I think— _Their_ years maun be—different tae oors.’

His face went ashen, because even if he was older than any other man alive he was also and at the same time only nineteen, and he greeted sair on his true love’s breast, for all his friends were dust and worms lang syne.

It was Janet’s father who saw the possibilities. Either the chiel was mad, or he was telling the truth. If the latter case pertained, he would know things that even the antiquaries didn’t. If the former—well she’d chosen him, and she’d have to thole. They tested him punctiliously on Crawfurd's _Peerage_  and _Lives and Characters_ , then Grose’s _Antiquities_ , and he was able to set those learned gentlemen right on a good many points. But of anything that took place after the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and thirty nine, he was innocent as a babe new born.

They all three rode to Edinburgh (Janet ignoring her husband’s protests) to consult Mr Fairford the advocate, who, rumour had it, was no stranger to mysterious exiles returning to claim their patrimony. At first he advised them to leave well alone; nothing good could come of evoking witchcraft in a courtroom these days. But Janet’s father, knowing Mr Fairford’s professional caution concealed an extravagantly romantic nature, was too canny to let it drop there. He got the lawyer talking _purely hypothetically, you understand_ , and by suppertime they were barricaded impregnably by a waist-high stack of dusty volumes and Mr Fairford’s giddy conviction that he had stumbled upon the case that would crown his legal career. 

That was six months ago. Now it was a glorious fresh day in late spring. The may was heavy-sweet in the hedgerows and through her casement Janet could hear lusty voices tunefully raised in song. But nothing could cheer her. The lawyers’ fees alone had come to exceed their annual household income; they were borrowing against Tam’s eventual installation as Duke of Roxburghe, Marquess of Bowmont and Cessford, Earl of Kelso, and Viscount Broxmouth to pay the servants and settle their (substantial, for a putative Duke must behave more like a Duke than a Duke himself) accounts with victuallers, tailors and vintners. Janet toyed with the silver stopper—all that survived—of her scent bottle. She wished she could just run away. She would have to go barefoot, because all of the seams of her shoes were split. The silk dressing-gown wouldn’t do either; even in this mild weather she'd starve of cold, but she still had an auld plaidie that she used to wear when she was supervising some of the rougher work of house and garden, back in the bygone, simple days. She shrugged off the gay, grass-green mantle, went over to her kist, and dug in it for the woollen cloak.

Her maid was bleating at her. She looked up, the plaidie in her hands. ‘What, Meg?’

‘Please m’lady, there’re some—er—travelling gentlemen at the yett. I reckon they sing reet bonny, m’lady, but—some o the skivvies are feart—there _are_ sixteen o em.  We was thinking you might mebbe cam doon an gie em a wee bit siller, m’lady, mak em gang awa—’

Janet threw the plaidie about her shoulders. More expense, she sighed. 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from the words of the Queen of Faerie at the end of the ballad 'Them that has gotten young Tam Lin/Has gotten a stately groom.'
> 
> My text is Child 39A, in which the sex that gets Janet pregnant can be presumed to be consensual (Mr Burns's asterisks!) I didn't want to get into the 'Of her he asked no leave' business of the D text.
> 
> My Scots is as dodgy as my legal knowledge, for both of which, apologies.


End file.
